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Anyone out there familiar with the use of Hebrew language when it comes to song lyrics?It occurred to me that the score is typically written left to rightBut Hebrew is written right to leftHow does one combine lyrics and score yet allow for this situation?

Your question piqued my curiousity. As I am not yet motivated on this cold, wet Sunday morning to get off the sofa and make breakfast, I researched. Here's what I discovered and, although I make no claim to be a language scholar, it might answer your question.

Apparently there is a language process called "transliteration." Which, according to the Online Dictionary means to represent (letters or words) of one language into the corresponding characters of another alphabet. So the "words" remain the same, they aren't translated like you'd translate French into English, but changed from one alphabet system into another.

So, when the Hebrew script is transliterated into romanized characters, the direction in which the text is read is reversed. That would answer your question. And it makes my head hurt to think about reading backwards and forwards!

I wonder, though, if the music had been composed by an ancient Hebrew-speaking composer and was actually written down somewhere, if there was some special music notation at that time that did read right to left?

I sing in the High Holy Days choir at one of my client's services, tho I'm not Jewish, it's just fun to sing. Many of those folks speak Hebrew. But in our music it's done the way JeanieA says - it's written out phonetically left to right. Which is not to say that I pronounce it right any way :\

But it's an interesting question about how it was done in the Middle Ages or earlier.

Cathy

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CathyPractice like you are the worst; play like you are the best - anonymous

I sing in the High Holy Days choir at one of my client's services, tho I'm not Jewish, it's just fun to sing. Many of those folks speak Hebrew. But in our music it's done the way JeanieA says - it's written out phonetically left to right. Which is not to say that I pronounce it right any way :\

But it's an interesting question about how it was done in the Middle Ages or earlier.

Cathy

In the Middle Ages I would suspect this was not a major issue as 99 percent of the world was illiterate and music was more or less passed down through the generations through one on one demonstration

Anyone out there familiar with the use of Hebrew language when it comes to song lyrics?It occurred to me that the score is typically written left to rightBut Hebrew is written right to leftHow does one combine lyrics and score yet allow for this situation?

I recently sang an opera that had some Hebrew lyrics. It was written out phonetically/transliterated. The same goes for Russian or Japanese lyrics.

Anyone out there familiar with the use of Hebrew language when it comes to song lyrics?It occurred to me that the score is typically written left to rightBut Hebrew is written right to leftHow does one combine lyrics and score yet allow for this situation?

I recently sang an opera that had some Hebrew lyrics. It was written out phonetically/transliterated. The same goes for Russian or Japanese lyrics.

Though for Hebrew speakers, Japanese speakers and Russian speakers, this may not apply.

Japanese is written left-to-right, so there's no trouble anyway. As a Final Fantasy fan, I have some of the OST songbooks. The lyrics are in Japanese. Interestingly, it's entirely written in hiragana (phonetic alphabet), not in kanji (the thousands of different Chinese characters), making it fairly easy to read. One can learn the hiragana alphabet in one or two weeks. I have NO idea what the words mean, but I could sing along happily. Assuming I could sing.

Russian language is also written left to right (and so is Norwegian if the question comes up). In other words, no problem.As a singer I once performed Bernstein's Chichester Psalms. The text was transliterated and written with latin letters. I recently composed two songs with lyrics in Tolkien's Elvish language. I considered turning the sheet 90 degrees counterclockwise.

But I would like to point out that I am a Hebrew speaker, and I did answer the question above.

So you did. I missed it. A google search shows that this question is actually discussed a lot. There is an interesting in depth article of the kinds of decisions that had to be made when the question first came up.on the topic